This cover appears to be from an alternate universe where Graham Greene is Mickey Spillane.

Though I guess technically the blurb at the top is accurate: Pinkie Brown is a psychotic killer and Brighton is a summer resort.

Download: Brighton Rock – Queen (mp3)

I did like reading a book on the Tube but now I’m no longer in London I have to make do with reading books on the Tube like this lovely-looking series of 12 books Penguin have put out to celebrate the Underground’s 150th birthday. Each one is about or inspired by a single Tube line with the authors taking a variety of approaches — historical, personal, humourous, political — to capture the meaning and, er, pyschogeography (big word!) of the system that binds the city together. I don’t think I’ll be shelling out for the whole boxset but to start I’ve ordered the ones about the lines that mean the most to me personally: the District (home), Northern (work), and Piccadilly (clubbing). Though I am intrigued by what Paul Morley has to say about the Bakerloo Line.

Download: Man On The Tube – The Passions (mp3)

This is from The Passions debut album Michael & Miranda which I wasn’t crazy about at the time (think I sold my copy) but its very 1980, nervy indie jangle sounds really good now. It appears to be out of print which is a shame, I guess they didn’t get “rediscovered” during the recent post-punk vogue.

I don’t wish to offend any Welsh people and I’m sure that there have been several famous battles fought in Wales (mostly against the English I bet) but I must admit that when I saw this book my first thought was of the old playground jokes about the shortest books in the world — like Italian War Heroes, The Biafran Book of Cookery, The Irish Book of Knowledge, and The German Joke Book.

There was also English Fine Cuisine so we were pretty much equal-opportunity offenders back then.

Here’s someone from the book Famous Welsh Singers which isn’t very long either but is full of quality.

Download: Chills And Fever – Tom Jones (mp3)

We all know the Lord of The Flies cliche about boys being little more than savages beneath a thin veneer of civilization, and anyone who has gone to an all-boys school knows that this is pretty much true. My comprehensive was no different, a pressure-cooker of raging hormones and cruel adolescent power games where the strong mercilessly preyed on the weak, the bookish, the different, the short-sighted.

Not surprisingly our tastes in reading material leaned toward the violent and nasty, and if it had a sprinkling of smut in it too so much the better. There was a sort of underground lending library system at school with certain parent- and teacher-unfriendly books being passed from one kid to another, often with the “good” pages marked for easy reference. Popular reads were Richard Allen’s Skinhead books and Jaws by Peter Benchley, but it was The Rats by James Herbert that was the must-read book we all couldn’t wait to get our hands on. I remember that it had such a cult, talked-about status at school (and a controversial reputation elsewhere), that when I finally got a copy passed to me I felt like I was handling radioactive material and immediately hid it in my Adidas bag until I got home.

Published in 1974, The Rats is a gruesome novel about London being terrorized by giant mutant rats with a taste for human flesh, and is full of lurid descriptions of people being attacked and killed in very, very nasty ways:

But as he stood, one of the larger rats leapt at his groin, pulling away his genitals with one mighty twist of his body. The tramp screamed and fell to his knees, thrusting his hands between his legs as if to stop the flow of blood, but he was immediately engulfed and toppled over by a wave of black, bristling bodies.

As you can imagine we — pardon the expression — ate this up with glee. A tramp had his knob bitten off by a rat! That bloke had his eyes chewed out! They ate a baby! I read it again recently (well, skimmed would be more accurate) and while I wouldn’t exactly call Herbert a good writer he’s an effective and efficient one; the story motors along from one horrific scene to another with no distracting subplots, and the only chapter that doesn’t have any bloody carnage in it has a sex scene instead — x-rated, vividly-described sex of course (chapter eight if you’re interested) — so the book managed to get our adolescent blood pumping into more than one organ. No wonder it we loved it so much, it was if it had been written by a committee set up to produce a book just to satisfy our particular bloody and lusty imaginations.

It’s been claimed that, under the schlocky horror, The Rats is actually a damning portrait of the run-down, dysfunctional state of London — and England — in the 1970s, and reading it again with grown-up eyes I did think that if you took away the killer rats you’d have a social-realist polemic. There are lots of angry references to slum neighbourhoods in the East End, dirty canals, neglected bomb-site wastelands, people living in poorly-built “concrete towers” with stinking rubbish chutes, and at one point the dustmen go on strike forcing the Army to be called in to clear rubbish from the streets which actually happened during the Winter of Discontent in 1979. The rats may have been mutant freaks but the novel makes it clear that they bred and thrived in a city one character curses as “Dirty bloody London!”

So if a teacher had caught me with it and asked me why I was reading such junk, I could have replied “Actually sir, it’s a devastating critique of the social, political, and environmental conditions in London today” — and he probably would have given me a clip ’round the ear and confiscated the book.

Download: Down In The Sewer – The Stranglers (mp3)
Buy: Rattus Norvegicus (album)
Buy: The Rats (book)

I’m under the cosh of an impending deadline at work right now so I’ll have to leave you these for your brains to chew on for a bit. Two old BBC films with the creepy atmosphere that 70s telly did so well featuring the great JG Ballard talking about the eroticism of cars and car crashes. Even if you think he’s talking a lot of silly bollocks (I’ve been in a car crash and believe me there wasn’t anything sexy about it) there’s still lots to enjoy: Sweeney-esque cars, the Westway, and Gabrielle Drake getting saucy with a gearstick.

A little tribute to J.D. Salinger. For more on the Catcher In The Rye-indie pop nexus read this.

“I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose.”

“Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.”

“He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God, I hate that stuff.”

“You ought to go to a boy’s school sometimes. Try it sometime,” I said. “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses.”

“Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.”

Download: A Sad Lament – Orange Juice (mp3)
(I’m cheating a little, this is actually the version on the “Texas Fever” album)

One of the inspirations for this blog was the book “Lost Worlds” by Michael Bywater, an eccentric and beautifully written compendium of lost things, feelings, places, attitudes and people. So I’m going to be lazy and let him do all the heavy lifting for this post. Besides, he’s a much better writer than me.

“Anyone born before 1960 will have known Aunt Joan, or a variant of her. Neat, effective, cheerful. Aunt Joan’s response to the slenderest of pleasures was: ‘How lovely!’ She lived alone in a little house on a fixed income and did wonders for charity. All her Christmas presents for the nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews were bought carefully, with thought and love, throughout the year. Aunt Joan never had to make the panic dash on Christmas Eve, nor did she ever forget a birthday. She was tiny, courteous, well groomed, well loved and lived an orderly life, never causing pain or even upset; and at the heart of this little life was an incalculable loneliness.
Aunt Joan had a secret. It was always the same secret, for all the Aunt Joans: a young man, an understanding, plans, hopes — and a war from which the young man never returned. The end. You kept going, you did your best, you looked on the bright side and remembered that there were lots and lots of people much worse off than you were. How much of what Aunt Joan was, was because of what she had lost — or had taken from her.”
Michael Bywater,
Lost Worlds (2004)

I was born in 1962 so the “Aunt Joan” in this sounds more like my Grandmother who was also tiny and cheerful (though my sailor Grandfather did come back from the war.) My aunts were more the type to just give us a 50p record token at Christmas, but it was Gran who actually took the trouble to ask us what records we wanted, which for a few years meant the poor old dear was going into her local Woolworth’s and buying Clash and Stranglers albums.

Download: If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake – Gracie Fields (mp3)

“The night was glorious, out there. The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars were peeping nosily beyond the neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in their jeans and separates, were floating down the Shaftesbury Avenue canals like gondolas. Everyone had loot to spend, everyone had a bath with verbena salts behind them, and nobody had broken hearts, because they were all ripe for the easy summer evening. The rubber plants in the espressos had been dusted, and the smooth white lights of the new-style Chinese restaurants — not the old Mah Jongg categories, but the latest thing with broad glass fronts, and Dacron curtainings, and a beige carpet over the interiors — were shining a dazzle, like some monster telly screens. Even those horrible old Anglo-Saxon public houses — all potato crisps and flat, stale ales, and puddles on the counter bar, and spittle — looked quite alluring, provided you didn’t push those two-ton doors that pinch your arse, and wander in. In fact, the capital was a night horse dream. And I thought, ‘My Lord, one thing is certain, and that’s that they’ll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s.’”
Colin MacInnes
“Absolute Beginners” (1959)

And make a musical out of it they did, though sadly it was a real stinker, unlike the novel which is still wonderful and stylishly captures London coming out of it’s drab post-war cocoon and becoming the young, hip, and multicultural city that it is today.

Anyone who’s ever been young and hit the town on a Saturday night with money in their pocket and wearing their sharpest clothes knows the feeling he’s talking about above. Those glorious moments when you feel like you’re at the centre of the universe and there’s nowhere else in the world to be at that moment: The city, the lights, the people, the music, the clubs, the buzz — you just drink it all up. For me it was London in the 80s and early 90s, stepping out of Leicester Square tube station with my mates, heading into Chinatown for a few drinks at the Dive Bar, then off to a nightclub for hours of dancing to fantastic music and flirting with beautiful girls (very occasionally getting somewhere with one), then maybe a late night coffee at Bar Italia or more drinks at one of the after-hours bars on Hanway Street before catching the Night Bus from Trafalgar Square (and eating one of the nasty, greasy hamburgers the street vendors sold there while waiting), sometimes not getting home until the sun was coming up. Even with a skinful of booze inside me I never felt more alive.

Now, of course, I’m an old geezer who flakes out after a few drinks at 11pm. But back then, well, to quote William Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!

The film might have been a load of rubbish but it did give us the best record David Bowie made in the 1980s (post-”Scary Monsters” anyway). This is the mega-long, 8-minute version.

Download: Absolute Beginners – David Bowie (mp3)